Wait you are comparing the interest in a book on Renoise on the interest in books on Exorcism/Demons/Amiga/C64 ?
Ok good luck…
Wait you are comparing the interest in a book on Renoise on the interest in books on Exorcism/Demons/Amiga/C64 ?
Ok good luck…
Haha, you have a point and thanks for wishing me, but no I am not comparing anything, you were the ones saying it “was last piece of shit (something something…)”, not me. Exorcism and Demons are a seriously HOT topic for the last 30 years or so, in terms of publishing. Read Malachi Martins’ Hostage to the Devil, Scott Peck’s People of the Lie , books by Gabrielle Amorth, The Exorcist’s Handbook by McCarthy, Pigs in the Parlor by Hammond and so many others, these are kinda the classics (I am a Demonology/Christian book collector and a staunch Christian). I am not going to focus only on Renoise but a whole other list of compatible topics that enable Renoise to shine on its own while taking into account both the history and the alternative production styles.
I wouldn’t worry about the potential audience. If every artist, or writer or musician worried about whether their product would have an audience and let it stop them, then nothing interesting would ever be made. Make it knowing that their might not be much of an audience, but having something out there historical about this is better than having nothing at all, so it’s an important, if thankless job. I would read your book anyway.
If every artist, or writer or musician worried about whether their product would have an audience and let it stop them, then nothing interesting would ever be made.
So true.
And I would love if I could pick up something like a coffeetable book covering the history of trackers in general, and not just Renoise in particular.
By the coffeetable format, I mean something that aims to inspire, not educate. Nothing gets more quickly outdated than a manual…
I wouldn’t worry about the potential audience. If every artist, or writer or musician worried about whether their product would have an audience and let it stop them, then nothing interesting would ever be made. Make it knowing that their might not be much of an audience, but having something out there historical about this is better than having nothing at all, so it’s an important, if thankless job. I would read your book anyway.
So true.
And I would love if I could pick up something like a coffeetable book covering the history of trackers in general, and not just Renoise in particular.
By the coffeetable format, I mean something that aims to inspire, not educate. Nothing gets more quickly outdated than a manual…
@skyscape and @danoise thank you very much for the support and good points in general. A coffee table format would be indeed fantastic, I am still thinking about the best way to present the final book and the tone etc. All points are welcome 
The market is a niche, so maybe write a book how to transition from one of the big DAWs to Renoise. Though I would not try to convince anyone to stop using a DAW that has very few deficiency like Bitwig. Maybe you could do a comparison with FL Studio which is a good reference in general. I mean, just if it’s really like bungle and you assume to some exent that no one would read a 100% Renoise book.
The market is a niche, so maybe write a book how to transition from one of the big DAWs to Renoise. Though I would not try to convince anyone to stop using a DAW that has very few deficiency like Bitwig. Maybe you could do a comparison with FL Studio which is a good reference in general. I mean, just if it’s really like bungle and you assume to some exent that no one would read a 100% Renoise book.
Its not like what Bungle says (he is funny :)). Its just that the effort has never been made till now. If so, then please name any previous ‘bombed’ books or whatever. I get it, its a niche thing, but then a lot of things are niche in todays world. While not everything niche warrants its own ‘book’ - trackers and Renoise have a weight to them that warrants getting a book out. Your points are good and I will take it into account while building the TOC. 100% Renoise is certainly a plan, but not just yet, first we have to warm the waters. Thanks!
All right fellow Renoisers, I just found the book proposal a potential home with an exceptionally classy publisher. Things are looking bright and I foresee a book coming out within a year that is by 2018 mid I suppose. I am yet to finalize the deal but the process has started and I would like to have all your encouragement and support. Cheers to us all! I envision a very busy set of months ahead 
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Did you publish this in the end?
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Firstly, a belated Merry Christmas to all of you I guess we are all busy with family and possibly quite a few who might be away from their dear ones as well, so best wishes to all and everyone. I love you all.
@noisemonkey wow, your last post was 12 years ago, amazing, so you dropped in just for Christmas I guess where were you during 2017 when I first joined?
To your point, I had this whole project preparation and even wrote the TOC, sent emails back and forth to the publisher (major one) and submitted it for review. Their editorial team gave back some helpful feedback regarding target market, sales potential, author experience and content mapping and selection. To be fair, the original TOC needs much rewrites as I probably then tried to masquerade Renoise in a generic music production book in an innocent effort to appeal to a wider audience in terms of readership who are not already familiar with tracker culture or tracker music software. That approach somewhat diluted the focus element when it comes down to projecting sales figures for a final book. Also, I was a fresh Renoise user and while I know my way around to get results, the innards of Renoise and its scripting was then very new for me as well. Additionally, more relevant workflows and academic music software processes and concepts that can be very well addressed while keeping Renoise as a focus was completely ignored from my end. In retrospect, I think now is the best time to reevaluate a better TOC and incorporate popular music production methods as well as combine academic music frameworks (such as Csound, CDP, PD etc), in a manner that brings the best of both worlds without being left wanting atleast in terms of the direction or intended audience(s). It is tricky and will need to be either 2 books or 1 with a well consolidated manuscript.
Then comes the question of do we even need such a book to which I would say an absolute YES. It brings merit to the entire culture and community of musicians and programmers and the Demoscene element which already has a few books extolling and exploring the history of the culture and its key elements, which is now recognized as a cultural heritage in Germany. Renoise is the culmination of how technology itself adapted to the culture of free music making and sharing around it, like Open Source music so any one can see the .mod files. The user manual does the job along with a plethora of trending and well made Youtube videos and the web blogs which are certainly doing their part in the evangelizing aspect of things. A book is a different feel though, even as a PDF download on Kindle/Nook/Pocketbook etc. I have quite a few tomes such as The Csound Book for instance and that it being present on my desk brings an entirely different and more authentic aspect to learning and reading about it.
Every Renoise user has their own production workflow, the more senior ones have a genuinely good grasp of how to work in Renoise, build scripts etc. Taktik possibly would be interested to contribute as well, but I think its best to try to come up with something more template based which can also not go over the head of the readers at least for a first offering. Just like MilkyTrackerX incorporates Csound, I think what we already have with the CDP Tool can be also done for Csound to get the best of literally everything one would need to make music on their computers, as we already have a million VSTs on each and every instrument and sample pack we can shake a stick at, so more options basically, like Csound for Live. Renoise can really benefit from this approach. Makes for good text material as well, as academic software has been around for 40+ years already, so its like two cultures meeting at a point in future. The average music listener on iTunes or a basic DJ producer (unlike BT who uses Csound extensively or folks of his brain/star power:)) won’t be too keen on using all these arcane code based music design and processing tools. But we are a leg up in this department as many of us do use such tools as well on a daily basis. I reckon at the end of the day its a matter of preserving legacy and responsibility to evangelize and educate others about something we all believe in as long term and long time users of a really good piece of music software.
Just a note, Blue by Steven Yi is a Csound IDE that also has a tracker note entry SoundObject, which is a timeline construct that takes tracker style inputs and converts to Csound score format. It is nowhere near the immediacy of Renoise or Schism tracker for instance and is very basic in its implementation as mostly a note entry abstraction but its there for those who can appreciate it. Cabbage converts Csound code to VSTs and its quite powerful and stands out with its premium offering. Especially if one can write their own opcodes in C/C++ and incorporate it inside the Csound framework as UGOs (User Generated Opcodes), the sky is the limit literally. Csound for Live already exists along with its Android port and WebIDE as well which does LiveCoding too; the rest of the academic softwares are somewhat behind in these departments. There is also something very timeless about textual programming inspite of having all these GUI widgets and VST export facilities on your table, it will stand the test of time. Similarly, I need to explore the Lua scripting for Renoise in detail which I am yet to see for myself in any detail to warrant my own feelings about it. So much to learn from all of you!
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Wow thanks for the super detailed reply. I lurk here quite a lot but Google searched and found your post as a physical book would be very useful for Renoise. Looking forward to it
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You have interesting quips of tracker history, please feel free to post more such insights and possibly point to some sources if available, photos etc, I can compile all this material to prepare for toc/manuscript as research material.
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I speculate that most of the market population of modern(2020++) music software are generation, that are not that interested in buying and reading books.
If they don not understand something, they will search for a YT video, or a quick tutorial article.
I think most of them are not too interested in the history of tracking - because why should they? who cares…? I do - but I am a bit of a nerd.
They want to make music now, for the now-age, for the stuff that’s going on now. They do not care to be burdened buy the weight of history or tradition of tracking.
Neither was I interested in the history of cubase or the classical music theory - I picked Fruity Loops because it just worked, few clicks of mouse and it goes Boom Boom Boom. 
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Hi!
I know there is at least one book about Renoise, but this is in Japanese:
Maybe you can contact the author to have some advice and feedback?
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A very nice heads up, thank you I will get in touch with the author for added pointers, he mentions that he wrote it for his students in the vein of the user manual itself which makes sense for a class of first time users. His experience putting it together and his publisher relationship will be a good insight on the process and will be helpful for my own project.
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Okay, I need to wait to see why posts are flagged by the community, but I trust you have some online links and resources to corroborate your points. If you do please share them here. I visited your YouTube channel, some good stuff though I need to see more of the tracker related content. Your English is kinda odd, you must be from Norway since you mention it but Norwegians are very good in spoken English and in writing so I wonder what’s your educational background and also if you can be a bit verbose about your own life and music. Share some music links so that I can enjoy your style of composition, I will visit your bio page here too in a moment.
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Why is this even flagged?
I understand your points but you cannot make everyone happy and have to choose your audience. I also plan to include dsp topics, but geared towards beatmakers and musicians and not just the math oriented folks. The appreciation of complex topics simplified but not dumbified will attract new readers and will sustain the more erudite ones from the community. FFT was pioneered in the 17th century, but most musicians probably won’t know or care to know what is its use in the very devices we use everyday. It is just one example. The text has to be well presented and made intuitive, book reader or not : learning new knowledge for themselves is always a rewarding experience. Ideally this would be a book I would have given myself years ago when music was an all encompassing affair for a young and keen college student. If you have read Gareth Loys Musimatics books for instance you would understand why books like that are so important for posterity. My goals are far more tempered but with focus.
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Japanese Renoise books are already available.
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Japan has always been an eclectic, pioneering and a dedicated community. She is also the world’s second largest music industry They have established a Japanese hip hop scene for decades now (Budamunk, Yotaro, DJ Krush, Dj Kentaro and others). It is the best market for such niches given that Renoise has its own Japanese forum, I am not surprised at all. We do need one in English though and cover a compendium of topics that go a bit further and also incorporate academic music frameworks as well as provide dsp explanations so that the next beat maker can be well equipped to enjoy their very own sounds, signal processors and generators and sample manglers while gaining a foundation they can build on and keeping Renoise as the primary hub for such excursions. Given the recent rise of tracker oriented hardware development, demand exists without a doubt.
Also, I am looking to connect Csound with Renoise in everyway I can. I might end up with a Renoise tool eventually as a result of my experiments. Csound works in Emacs (which I use a lot, M-x csound-mode), Vim and Vscode. As a shell command, it can be scripted extensively. It has an API, it does REPL live coding via udp protocol and the API, and it uses OSC as well. So given the options it’s not a difficult thing to come up with if one is comfortable enough with Lua and some commitment to a dev schedule. If I can use csound scripts inside Renoise with Renoise’s sequenceing powerhouse, it’s all I would need for the end of times, the perfect partnership.
Book chapters will also introduce Csound and how it can readily used to build your own sampler, bass synth, granular synthesizer, FM etc and essentially a hip hop beatmakers regular arsenal. Then there are aspects of key grouping and midi real-time performance to be succinctly covered along with use of midi channels and controller opcodes. Renoise will be presented as a beatmakers tool along with a host of diagrams and mindmaps to make the interface appealing to newer users. BTW the Csound score syntax is very much a per note per line entry exactly like we are used to in trackers. It does have a parameter list array for each note in order to control the instrument it is destined for. It is like music assembly programming not unlike hardware synth patch cables. So it covers the analog base as well in terms of explanations and examples.
Because this method of note entry is native to both Renoise and Csound, it’s perfect opportunity to combine both as they are complimentary.
Then there is the thing about writing style and good editing, publisher branding, page count, projected sales figures etc. I expect diverse musical communities to benefit from this synthesis of either niches, one cultural and the other academic. The Csound user manual and plethora of resources do explain a lot, just like Renoise resources does for its own, however, I am yet to find a singular resource that provides a presentation that the everyday beat maker would be able to use with great efficiency so should they choose to do so. When it comes to crunching manuals they are not the best crowd known for attention span on printed text. Therefore, a well prepared manuscript is well in order for a more cerebral beat maker or the ‘instant coffee’ type too. Additionally this text can potentially fasttrack someone looking for a university course in such topics.
My question to all of you, as Renoise users what topics would you like to be covered? Compiling this is an important part of the preparation process !
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